1Populations at Risk

Let me start by saying that I think the fundamental challenge of our times is this: there are currently 68.5 million people in the world who are displaced by persecution, conflict, and/or mass atrocities, the largest number of people displaced since World War II. Confronting this crisis is an international system that is worn and fraying at the edges. Essentially, we have a twentieth-century United Nations trying to deal with twenty-first-century problems, or, as I think it was once put in an editorial in the Washington Post, a Remington typewriter UN trying to deal with an iPhone world. There has been a general decline in interstate conflicts since the end of the Cold War. But the number of high-intensity conflicts within states has increased since 2007. And over the past few years, we have seen a particular rise of non-state armed groups, such as the Islamic State or Boko Haram, that are also fueling mass atrocity crimes in conflicts around the world. Meanwhile, when we look at the preeminent body of international politics, the UN Security Council and it is bitterly divided and struggling to cope in a climate of noncompliance with its resolutions and almost routine violations of the foundations of international law. So the issue we are discussing today is important. I believe it is deeply important, and I know many of the people in this room believe that the norms that protect our fundamental human rights and bind our international community do not live and die in isolation from one another. They are interlocking, and they are mutually reinforcing.

So to rewind, if I could. The Responsibility to Protect was unanimously adopted at the UN’s World Summit in 2005, which was the largest single gathering of heads of state and government in human history. At its heart, R2P is very simple. It concerns four crimes and three pillars. The core idea is that all governments have an obligation to protect their citizens from the four mass atrocity crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. First, the responsibility to protect people from these crimes falls first and foremost on the sovereign government. That is pillar 1. Second, the international community has an obligation to assist any state that is struggling to uphold its protective responsibilities. That is pillar 2. And third, if a government is manifestly unable or unwilling to exercise its responsibility to protect, then the international community is obligated to act. That is pillar 3. I think the underlying premise, as one of our friends, Ramesh Thakur, once put it, is a fundamental rejection of both unilateral interference and institutionalized indifference when it comes to mass atrocities in the world today. And I think in that sense R2P is a demand-driven norm. What I mean by that is, as long as mass atrocities exist in the world, the UN Security Council and the international community, will have to figure out a way to respond. And despite the progress that has been made, it is always going to be a delicate and imperfect and probably contentious enterprise. I think that is in part because the ideas surrounding R2P are inherently disruptive.

So where are we with regard to R2P? Fourteen years after it was adopted, what does the balance sheet say? On one level, we have made extraordinary progress, in terms of the proliferation of scholarship, of the ideas seeping into different parts of the global system. Institutionally, more than a quarter of all UN member states have now appointed a national R2P focal point and joined the Global Network of R2P Focal Points. This is the largest governmental network dedicated to preventing mass atrocities, with a focus on what can be done domestically, regionally, and internationally. The UN Security Council has adopted more than eighty resolutions that reference R2P. And because of these resolutions, R2P and the protection of civilians features in the mandates of eight of the fourteen current UN peacekeeping operations. Those operations involve 95 percent of the one hundred thousand peacekeepers currently on active duty. The Human Rights Council has invoked R2P in more than forty-two resolutions and in the findings of several of its important commissions of inquiry on mass atrocities. This reflects that R2P is not just an idea, but a guide to early warning and timely action. It has made a real difference in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan and in other situations. So those are the positives.

But there have also been setbacks and controversies. To the extent that there is divisiveness around R2P today, it is rooted in differing perspectives on what to do when prevention fails and it becomes necessary to act. The record of R2P, like all living international norms, is not unblemished.

So how does cultural heritage fit into all of this? Jim Cuno already alluded to the fact that Raphael Lemkin, who was personally responsible for the creation of the term “genocide,” was acutely aware of the relationship between culture and atrocities. Not least of all because, as a Polish Jew, he understood, in a very direct and immediate way, the way in which the Nazis had demolished the cultural underpinnings of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. So his conception of genocide included “the desecration and destruction of cultural symbols, destruction of cultural leadership, destruction of cultural centers, and the prohibition of cultural activities.” But opposition from some UN member states saw Lemkin’s ideas regarding the connection between culture and genocide excluded from the final version of the Genocide Convention that was adopted in 1948. I work for the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, in New York. We do advocacy with the UN Security Council and with the Human Rights Council in Geneva, and we work on country situations in which people are facing the threat of mass atrocities. We started to take this issue a lot more seriously after the rise of ISIS in 2014, when it became impossible not to see the connections between these different sorts of things. In all of the lands that were occupied by ISIS between 2014 and 2017, the armed group systematically set out to destroy what it considered deviant aspects of Syria’s and Iraq’s cultural heritage. Notoriously, of course, in the Mosul Museum, ISIS used sledgehammers to deface, topple, and destroy statues from pre-Islamic Mesopotamia. At Nimrud, they blew up and then bulldozed the ruins of an ancient Assyrian city. At Palmyra, they famously destroyed the Roman theater and killed and beheaded Khaled al-Asaad, the archaeologist who had spent most of his life protecting those ruins. They also burned books in Mosul’s library and engaged in the illegal trafficking of antiquities for profit. Of course, those acts seem to many people to pale in comparison to some of ISIS’s other atrocities. In addition, we worked very closely with the Yazidi community in northern Iraq, so I know the stories of people who survived what ISIS did. ISIS’s policy represented a systematic attempt to scrub away the identity, the history, and the memory of entire peoples in Iraq and the Middle East.

Far from hiding these acts of vandalism, ISIS celebrated them. And I’m really glad that Irina Bokova is with us today, because she deserves an enormous amount of credit within the UN system for emphasizing cultural cleansing. Of course, as many people here know, cultural heritage is already protected under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. It is also considered part of customary international law by the International Committee for the Red Cross. War crimes also, according to article 8 of the Rome Statute of the ICC, include “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, art, education, science, and charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected.” In September 2016, Ahmad al-Mahdi, a member of an armed extremist group from northern Mali, was found guilty at the ICC of committing a war crime for his role in the deliberate partial destruction of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Timbuktu. It was in response to this, in March 2017, that the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2347, deploring the destruction of humanity’s shared cultural heritage and noting the ICC verdict.

Not long after that, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect cohosted an event with the governments of France and Italy, on the margins of the UN General Assembly, at which Irina Bokova spoke and at which the ICC chief prosecutor also spoke on how to protect cultural heritage from terrorism and mass atrocities. Jim Cuno and Tom Weiss were there, too, and spoke from the floor and circulated a draft of the first Getty Occasional Paper, for which Tom was the lead author. All of the speakers emphasized that defending cultural heritage was not just about preserving statues but also about protecting people. Many people also emphasized that there was a disturbing convergence between ISIS’s acts of cultural vandalism and its effort to exterminate entire peoples. Here I quote Irina Bokova: “In today’s new conflicts, these two dimensions cannot be separated. There is no need to choose between saving lives and preserving cultural heritage. The two are inseparable.” I think she was absolutely right to say that, because in my own work with my own organization we have seen very similar dynamics, in Myanmar, for example, with the Rohingya, and in other places in the world where atrocities are occurring today.

I want to make one final point. Very recently, we published a policy brief on the Uyghur situation in China. It was not an easy road to publish that policy brief. First, we had to find somebody who would write it. The author had to be anonymous and was taking a risk writing that for us. Further, the author had to be a Mandarin speaker. We jointly published with some colleagues at the Asia Pacific Center for the Responsibility to Protect. We also met with the World Uyghur Congress, the main diaspora body of Uyghurs. But the main point of that policy brief was to talk about the systematic discrimination against Uyghurs, the laws that are directed against them, and the fact that more than a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in China, are currently in so-called reeducation camps. But there is a less well known fact. The Chinese government has started to systematically demolish many historic mosques. Of ninety-one major Uyghur historical and cultural sites identified by the Uyghur community itself, thirty-three have been destroyed since 2016, including the Yutian Aitika Mosque near Hotan, which dates to the year 1200 and which was destroyed—bulldozed, in fact—in March of this year. So when we talk about protecting cultural heritage, we are talking about defending what makes us human. I come from an Irish family, and we have a saying in the Irish language that all people, all human beings, live in the shadow of one another. This always reminded me of another saying, one that comes from Zulu culture in South Africa, the spirit of ubuntu, which means that humans are humans through other humans. I think the Responsibility to Protect is fundamentally about understanding the connection between vulnerable people and culture and defending both. It is about upholding what makes us human.

I want to talk about a couple things that build on some comments that Simon just made. It seems to me that we have to find a new way of working at this. The content of the Responsibility to Protect has changed a great deal over time. It had to morph in a number of ways. And it seems to me that we need a similar overall conception for the protection of cultural heritage. But if we think of the conceptual piece, we have to tie it to a strategic framework and, eventually, a political-legal framework that works. Making these connections, I think, is going to be more difficult than perhaps we initially realize. I think the need is tremendous. The fact that it is difficult does not mean that we should not make the effort. But we should not be too sanguine about how the pieces are going to come together.

When Jim Cuno asked me to write a paper, I thought that looking at a very different way of framing would be a way to bring a new perspective, new ways of thinking about this. I do not think we can apply cultural genocide as such to R2P, for a number of reasons. Obviously, it has never been accepted by the international community. And the politics are every bit as difficult today as they were in the years 1946 to 1948. But I do think we should go back to Raphael Lemkin’s original conception of genocide as having a number of elements, a number of ways of going about it. He was, of course, looking at the Nazi experience in eastern Germany, of occupation. And therefore, the number of tools and the way they used to go about it—in terms of administrative, economic, sociological, all sorts of different ways—was a sort of totalitarian concept of genocide. And of course, it does not always work out that way. But it does seem to me that the goal was to destroy other, inferior cultures. It is crucial, I think, to recognize that cultural identity is fundamental to all of this. And I think we see that the cultural piece is fundamental, whether this is in the debates about immigration or movements of people or about identity and the politics of identity. And the rejection of other cultures and the danger one sees in foreign cultures are fundamental to much of this. Cultural destruction did not play a big role in the 2001 concept of R2P. It played almost no role in the 2005 outcome document of the member states. This is not a surprise. We put a little bit about cultural destruction in the 2009 report of the Secretary-General, and I think Jennifer [Welsh] and others have added to that since; but it still has been treated as a rather minor piece of what R2P is all about. I think we need to recognize that in the protection of populations, the protection of cultural heritage should be seen as very much interconnected and interdependent in many ways.

Now, let me say a word or two about why I am not quite so sanguine about all of this. It is not that I am saying it is not important; I think it is extraordinarily important. Kofi Annan failed for several years to get the member states to see a connection between legality, on the one hand, and morality, on another. But it takes iterations to get to something that works. I think we can see many elements in R2P that would be related. But we cannot just extend R2P to cultural heritage. You know, we told the member states a thousand times that this was only about the four crimes and their incitement, and we would not go an inch beyond that. We told them that the approach was narrow but deep, and that we would only stick with those four crimes. The only way that R2P was accepted in 2005 was this understanding that the member states said they needed to know exactly which crimes this applied to. Because the great suspicion remains today that powerful states would take something like R2P and apply it to all sorts of different things in different ways. And you can’t tell them a thousand times that it is only these things, that is all they have agreed to, but we are going to, willy-nilly, apply it to other areas because the other areas are important. So I think it would be political suicide to simply say we are going to extend R2P. R2P remains very contentious. Just working it out vis-à-vis the four crimes and their incitement is proving to be a generational effort. And it should be, because of its importance. It is not going to happen overnight. But then you cannot just extend it. There are many elements of R2P, which I think will come out today and tomorrow, that tell us a lot, including the idea of setting up a commission and getting independent ideas, because member states are not going to come up with this kind of thing. So that is not one way to go about it.

Now, the concept of cultural genocide has lots of problems. One of them is, whose cultural genocide? Whose cultural heritage are we talking about? It is not just a question of counterterrorism. It is not just a question of armed groups. It is not just the question of groups that we call “terrorists.” And I am glad to finally mention the Uyghur issue. I think it applies very well to what is happening to the Rohingya in Burma. So it would be nice to say it is only about counterterrorism. It would be nice to say it is only about nasty groups that everyone disagrees with. But I do not think that is the case. I think the truth is that governments do this as well. Historically, our government has done it, the Soviet government has done it, the Chinese government has done it, the Australian government has done it, the Canadian government has done it; many governments have done it. As part of the settler mentality and as part of the nation-building enterprise, the destruction of other cultures, unfortunately, has been a part of history. There is nothing new about this. I think Barbara Harff put it well when she called this “politicide.”

But it does seem to me that what we read about in the period 1946–48 was that many governments, including Western governments, were extremely uncomfortable with the notion of including cultural genocide under the Genocide Convention. The French, the Americans, the Danes, the British, the Canadians, the Australians—you name it—all said, “Oh, no, no, we’ll put that under human rights. We’ll get around to it under human rights.” Of course, they did not get around to it under human rights. But it does seem to me that those same countries resisted when indigenous people raised the question of cultural genocide in the 1990s. The same countries were against including that language in the 1990s that were against it in the 1940s. And many of those are the same countries that would love to say this is only about counterterrorism, who would love to say this is only about non-state actors. But unfortunately, it is not just about non-state actors, and it is not just about terrorism. It is about a political project, whoever is carrying it out, that wants to identify certain cultures as inferior to others, as getting in the way in the larger nation-building project. So if we fool ourselves into thinking this is going to be politically easy or everyone is coming together on the same page, I just do not think that is true. There is going to be resistance, and I think we have to recognize that.

And that, to me, is why building the conceptual umbrella or conceptual framework is especially important. This may be adding difficulty or obstacles to this project, but I do this because I think the project is extremely important. We have to be very careful that we do not take the path of least resistance.

It is always difficult to speak after Simon and Ed and say anything fresh. But I want to start with a different example from the one discussed over the last day. And that is the specter of the burning of Notre-Dame Cathedral. Of course, it is not an example of destruction during armed conflict, but it is an example of an important global monument falling before our very eyes. Now, I think that is important to keep in the background, because, of course, it is easy for all of us, particularly those of us who are academics, to tell you how ambitious and complicated this initiative is going to be. And I think others, over the next day and a half, are going to speak about how any such program needs to consider what it means to have it led by Western states and about the various strands of effort required. I just want to talk about two contextual elements that I think will shape the efforts: the changing character of conflict and the contemporary geopolitical and normative environment.

The first—and this is obvious but important to state—is that R2P was designed as a political and not a legal principle. It was not designed to create new law but to enhance compliance with existing law. Kofi Annan once said, “We have all the law we need. That’s not our problem. Our problem is compliance with existing law.” So, as a political principle, I think how you feel about R2P to a certain extent has to do with how much you think political principles matter. If you do not think they matter, then you do not think it is particularly powerful. But if you do, I think you can isolate at least three rules of a political principle. The first is mobilizing the will to act, the second is raising the political cost of inaction, and the third concerns political principles that can build institutional capacity. The R2P agenda, among other things, has built incredible institutional capacity at the local, national, regional, and international levels and in academia. So that may be something to think about if this framework is partly political: how to expressly think about those three roles of a political principle or framework.

Second, the shape and the meaning of R2P have evolved over time. It is a living and breathing principle. And partly because it is quite open-ended, it is about bringing about a state of affairs; it is not about prescribing particular actions. That has always been a criticism. So it has been contested. And again, one can see that as a weakness or a strength.

Let me just elaborate a bit on the context for thinking about this effort in contemporary international relations. First I want to talk about the changing nature of armed conflict. The first point I want to make, from the perspective of the protection of human beings, is that armed conflict is not the primary source of violent death and destruction globally for human beings. The majority of states most affected by lethal violence today are not formally at war. And the levels of lethal violence in some conflict settings are higher than in war zones. So if you look at the Global Burden of Armed Violence Study of 2015, it shows that, on average, just over half a million people die annually in violent circumstances. Only 15 percent of those die in formal armed conflict settings. The remainder die in non-war settings, what the ICRC sometimes calls situations other than war. So while some of the most violent countries in the world—Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Pakistan—are war zones, some Latin American and Caribbean countries that are not at war are more dangerous places to live. Other countries with high levels of lethal violence—Brazil and Mexico—are not in a state of formal armed conflict. Yet it is also true that much of this violence is not random; it is organized and, in some cases, political.

The second point is that committing crimes against humanity, or genocide, does not require the context of an armed conflict. Many of you know this, but I think it is important to reiterate. Think of the genocide in Cambodia and the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. These were and are not instances of formal armed conflict. So in a sense, that was the strength of the Responsibility to Protect: it covered issues of protection, both when you have a formal armed conflict and when you do not. And this changes the institutional framework, the legal framework we think in. Although the vast majority of countries in the world live in a zone of peace, the remaining 20 percent are experiencing lethal, predominantly civil, conflict, where there are indiscriminate attacks on civilians, annihilation of minorities, starvation of populations. And these are part of the strategic repertoire of belligerence. They are not something that happens in the fog of war; they are deliberate.

What are the key changes with respect to the conduct of war? Let me briefly spell out four. As has been mentioned, the rise of intrastate or civil war. I think it is also worth noting that civil wars, on average, are lasting longer, many of them for more than twenty years, and many of them are very hard to bring to resolution through some of our traditional tools, whether we are thinking of mediation or peacekeeping forces, as the Democratic Republic of Congo shows. The urbanization of warfare has been mentioned, even the return to the old military strategy of the siege, as we saw with Aleppo. And again, just think, international humanitarian law (IHL) does not, in and of itself, prohibit sieges. It tries to make them less lethal for civilians, but it does not prohibit them outright. So we are seeing a return to that mode of warfare, as well as aerial bombardment of urban centers, both as a strategic tool and as a tactical tool. Third—and I think this is important—is the internationalization of civil wars and the use of local proxies by outside powers. At least a third of all civil wars are now internationalized. Sometimes you see those proxy relationships acting as a force of restraint, but at other times they can fuel and enhance the capabilities of local proxies. It can be very difficult to locate responsibility in that dynamic relationship. Some analysts are now talking about the phenomenon of hybrid wars—Yemen, Iraq, Ukraine—which involve irregular forces on the ground backed by the sophisticated capabilities of regional or global partners. And, again, that hybridization makes it harder to ensure accountability.

Concerning changes in the nature of combatants, I want to come back to Ed’s point about non-state armed groups not being the only culprits. I found this assumption something we need to challenge. Over and over again when I worked in the UN system, I was told that the problem with respect to atrocity crimes was the nasty non-state armed groups. But as my ICRC friends always reminded me, states are still the biggest perpetrators of atrocity crimes against populations. And of course, we have seen a real proliferation in the number of groups. The ICRC has noted that more non-state armed groups have arisen in the past six or seven years than in the past six or seven decades. So when we think about non-state armed groups and how this initiative might come to grips with those, it is really important to unpack this category and acknowledge the wide array of actors we are talking about, because the differences among them affect not only how they behave but also how one might counteract their threats to populations and infrastructure and cultural heritage.

I think we could broadly conceive of five axes of differentiation. The first is objectives. Those can range from pushing for government reform (the FARC in Colombia or the old LTTE in Sri Lanka) to regime overthrow (the Houthis in Yemen) to the creation of a new territorial and political order, in the case of Da’esh. The more concrete the political objective, the more likely the group is to engage with the process of negotiation if that will help them achieve their goal. Conversely, the lack of that political objective can frustrate engagement and often change the nature of the violence used.

The second axis is organizational type. Some of these non-state armed groups have statelike features, clear chains of command, and a leadership that exercises control. And many of the anticolonial and secessionist movements organized themselves in a hierarchical fashion precisely to show that they were like sovereign states and had those attributes. But many non-state armed groups are divided into competing factions with very ambiguous lines of command. And in fact, some of them consciously embrace fragmentation as a strategy for survival, relying on loosely allied, self-managing units.

The presence and strength of ideology is a third differentiating factor. Ideologies both inform agendas and justify the ways these groups operate. Now, interestingly, some ideologies do not justify or support attacks on civilian populations or infrastructure and might even serve to restrain these groups. But for violent extremists, ideologies construct threats, they attribute guilt, they serve as a justification for targeting and extermination. Some of the literature on R2P calls this an atrocity-justifying ideology, which provides a very powerful resource for recruitment, let alone for engagement in violence.

Turning to the fourth axis, the strategies and tactics of non-state armed groups also vary widely. Some consciously attempt to adhere to principles of IHL, for example, those that have signed deeds of commitment with Geneva Call, the NGO that works with non-state armed groups. At the other extreme, ISIS actually takes pleasure in flouting international legal obligations.

The fifth and final axis along which these groups are distributed is the nature of the relationship to territory and the civilian population. For those who are engaged in self-determination struggles, the claim to particular territory and international recognition of that claim are really important. Others draw their support from a particular sector of the community and try to deepen that support by providing social services and other governance functions. By contrast, groups like the Lord’s Resistance Army do not attempt to hold territory or provide services to civilians, making them less susceptible to traditional forms of pressure. And of course, ISIS is even harder to categorize, as at one point it had territorial control but now is much more diffuse.

So the conclusion to be drawn from this very brief survey is that “non-state armed group” is a very broad umbrella term. This project needs to engage very directly with that reality and think through the different contexts in which we are talking about those who destroy not just communities of people, but cultural heritage. And we also need to pay attention to their patterns of violence.

But the other point I want to make is that non-state armed groups do not operate in a legal vacuum. They are bound by a considerable range of relevant obligations under international humanitarian law, and individual members of those groups can be subject to international criminal law. So that is important for us to keep in mind. In addition, while international human rights law is relatively limited with respect to non-state armed groups, given that it is focused on obligations of states, developments in international criminal law, particularly the broadening of the scope of crimes against humanity and war crimes, have created possibilities for establishing responsibility for members of non-state armed groups. That is another important contextual factor. But if we think less about law and more about political imperatives, I think there is also the potential to think more expansively about the responsibilities of non-state armed groups. States generally retain the primary responsibility to protect populations, but to protect cultural heritage, non-state actors that exert effective control can also be said to have political responsibilities if not legal ones.

Now of course, skeptics of this approach will probably argue that if you attribute responsibilities to them, then you are legitimizing them, you are giving them statelike attributes, and you need to be concerned about that. But I do not think that that is necessarily so. We can see that through the work of Geneva Call, which strikes a very delicate balance between engaging with non-state armed groups and not claiming that this legitimizes them.

As my last point here before I turn to the geopolitical context, I want to reiterate that the culprits in the erosion of respect for international humanitarian law are not only non-state armed groups. Nation-states themselves, either directly or through their support for allies, are contributing to the erosion of the international humanitarian order. Warring parties have driven a bulldozer through the openings in IHL, in order to roll back their obligations to protect civilians. And this is not only the case with actors such as the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, but also some liberal democracies when they are at war. I think it is very important to keep this in mind as we go forward with this initiative.

Now, all of these cases of violations of the laws of war are creating a gap between the public’s knowledge and expectation of IHL, which is at an all-time high, and the reality of compliance. One of the legal advisers to the ICRC, Helen Durham, has warned that we need to ensure that this gap does not develop into a vicious cycle in which not respecting the law becomes the new normal. And perhaps this can be part of what we do in this initiative, in terms of thinking about the law that protects cultural property.

So, second and finally, let me make some comments about the geopolitical context in which we are working. Both Ed Luck and Simon Adams have talked about competition between major powers, which is very different from the context in which the Responsibility to Protect arose. We had continuing forms of competition at that time, but today that competition is strategic. As we hear every day in the trade war between the United States and China, it is economic, and increasingly, it is becoming political. There are still those, like Francis Fukuyama, who claim that there is no alternative to the liberal democratic ideology in the world today; but we are seeing competition over ways of life at a Great Power level that I think is important. There is lack of political space within the UN Security Council for a thematic agenda generally. Let me give you one example. One of the outputs of the normative steps that were taken in the early 1990s was a Protection of Civilians report by the Secretary-General. Every twelve to eighteen months, the Security Council would read a report. Three or four years ago, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) could not find a state to table that report. The Western states on the council said, “We simply do not have the political capital to spend on thematic issues. All we can do is try to reach agreement on particular country situations.” And for me, that was an incredibly powerful demonstration of where we are.

There has also been an infection of all issues with this geopolitical dynamic. I don’t know if Simon would agree with me, but whereas four or five years ago you could insulate the Central African Republic and Burundi, to separate these cases from the broader geopolitical dynamic, today it is becoming harder and harder to do that. And I think the conversations on Venezuela that have happened in the Security Council reveal just how every place on the globe is now being seen as a place for these struggles.

Two last points. First, peacekeeping missions themselves are under enormous strain. So I read with interest Simon’s focus on adding to the mandate of the mission in Mali an element of respect for cultural property. But there are huge demands on peacekeeping operations today. And their mandates are often not implemented, despite what the Security Council will say. So despite the fact we have had a mandate to protect civilians, including through the use of force by peacekeeping missions, that mandate has often not been fulfilled. The missions on the ground do not fulfill it, for various reasons. And so when you think about adding more tasks to the agenda of peacekeeping operations, we have to think through the realities of implementation, which often lie with troop-contributing countries.

Second, I think there has been a problematic focus, at least within Western states, on upholding what they call the “liberal international order.” That multilateralism today is under attack, they say, and how we must respond is by buttressing the liberal international order, which, it is claimed, IHL and other instruments are part of. I think this is a very dangerous strategy in the world that we live in. I think the future is about talking to a variety of states about a rules-based international order, not the liberal international order, not the rules-based order, because we are moving into a world in which we have to be open to the reform of that system. As I saw continuously when I was working in my mandate on R2P, you cannot separate states’ positions on issues like protection from their views on the legitimacy of the multilateral order, of the composition of the Security Council, of the way that our rules-based system works. We may say, “Well, they shouldn’t bring those political concerns into this discussion,” but they do. And so I think that is an important backdrop, also, for the work that you are doing.

I work in what has been called “human security,” a humanitarian response to violent conflict—protection of civilians and response to their needs when protection fails. I was part of a small group evaluating civilian casualties and response in the Battle of Mosul, and I have been working in the Northern Triangle of Central America, which, after Syria, has the highest violent death rates in the world. One of the striking things I have learned about the issue of protecting cultural heritage is that the claim to legitimacy for cultural heritage protection is based on the inseparability of the protection for cultural heritage and human security. That comes up in virtually every comment that has been made. It also is central to the writings that try to elevate the requirements for protecting cultural heritage in a more general political environment. I believe in the inseparability. However, I just finished a paper months in the works, with Jennifer, for which I reviewed hundreds of articles and reports on humanitarian response to violent conflict, and almost none said anything about the protection of cultural heritage. The ones that did approached cultural heritage strictly within a counterterrorism framework: financing of insurgency and using illicit economies as financing tools. So I am confronted by a very stark contradiction, or paradox: the central claim to legitimacy coming out of the cultural heritage world and the complete ignoring of that claim by the humanitarian or human security world, which seems essential to the position and the hope of protecting cultural heritage.

My question is, would it be useful to confront this dilemma, this contradiction, this paradox, head-on, in a way that could help bridge these two arenas of concern, which I believe are clearly linked? But certainly in the humanitarian world, that is not a central concern. The way that the issue is often posed is saving lives versus saving stones. And of course, that is a condescending way that physicians and humanitarian medical types, humanitarians, view the issue. It may be linked at some level, but this linkage is elastic. It is deformed by a hierarchy of atrocities that elevates bombing civilians and bombing cultural heritage, objects of cultural importance. Let’s look at what is inseparable, what is elastic, and what is not.

First is the issue of destruction of cultural heritage as prelude to the destruction of people—that it is a foreshadowing. It is the Heine quote that there is a connection that is central. We all know and have heard examples of this foreshadowing of this connection. However, it is an empirical question. It is not theoretical. What portion of all the atrocities against people or organized violent attacks on people are foreshadowed by attacks on cultural objects? That is an empirical question. There are databases where we could look at that. Now, again, we have enough evidence, going back to Kristallnacht, that shows us that there is a connection. But for humanitarians, it is not only that there is a connection, but there is the condition of frequency of those connections that is important. It may be that every time you damage or destroy a synagogue or a cultural object, it will lead to threatening, hurting, or killing people. But what portion of attacks on humans are foreshadowed by going after objects? It may be 5 percent of the time. And for humanitarians who are totally preoccupied by saving lives and going out and avoiding bombs and bullets to do surgery, it makes a big difference that these conditional frequencies are critical in a very pragmatic way.

It also comes up with the discussion of Lemkin and the integration of cultural considerations into notions of genocide. I buy it. I think everybody would buy it. But the vast majority of violent attacks and organized violence on people are not genocidal in nature, by anybody’s definition. And therefore, you get these disconnects between the reality of what people are facing in the humanitarian world and what is being discussed for a genocide framing that certainly, tragically, does occur but may not characterize the majority of conflicts where humanitarians are active. Counterterrorism has been mentioned. But it is the singular thing that does come up in the humanitarian world because of the finance and the illicit economy support, if not for the origins of these insurgencies, then for the maintenance of them, where criminal activity is blended with ideology in ways that the traditional dichotomy between grievance and greed is completely eradicated; these are really one and the same. The issue of coming back to the security lens becomes the area that I feel is the most compelling linkage, bringing the issue of cultural heritage more directly into the center of humanitarian theory, humanitarian response in the real world. It comes out as a form of destabilizing local security. It breaks the social fabric of communities. But this is not well developed in the humanitarian world, or precisely for the humanitarian world. It is also necessary to understand that mental health questions, questions of the impact of war on the mental health of individuals and the collective mental health of communities, has been traditionally undervalued in the humanitarian world. Only recently have mental health issues been elevated to be almost as important as surgery to deal with trauma associated with blast injury—that the psychological trauma becomes critically important in the claims to legitimacy of cultural heritage. And yet it begins to erode by the time it is translated into a humanitarian arena. In some ways, in the humanitarian world, people are talking about resilience, individual resilience, in terms of the long-term effect of violent conflict, and community resilience. By destroying cultural heritage, in many ways we are destroying the fabric of resilience in these communities or for these individuals in ways that have not been adequately addressed. I focus a lot on what is called the indirect effects of war. I do worry about the direct effects—being exposed to bombs and bullets. I am a clinician and work on those issues. But when you destroy the essentials of life—food, water, shelter—you have these reverberating effects that go on for years and almost always far surpass the direct effects from bombs and bullets in terms of mortality. And this arena becomes very important for understanding the impact of cultural heritage. It is underdeveloped, in the cultural heritage world but also in the humanitarian world, and has, I think, enormous promise as a way to begin to integrate the two fields.

Humanitarian types like to think of themselves as risk-takers, going out and avoiding roadblocks and risking our lives to save people, while the cultural heritage people are in museums and sitting around seminar tables. Now, this is terribly unfair, particularly when you look at what happened in Palmyra, with curators who are giving their lives to protect cultural heritage. But there is a kind of cultural bias that also creates obstacles. And these are barriers that should not be there and will need to be overcome at some level: it is not a question of saving stones; it is a question of saving touchstones to the human psyche. They are touchstones to, in some ways, the human heart. That speaks to the humanitarian world and what humanitarians care about, what doctors care about; but it has not been addressed with that kind of language, that kind of power, that kind of empirical evidence that I think could be useful.

I am not willing to disassociate yet between the humanitarians and the cultural heritage people. It may be that we need multiple strategies working in parallel. But I have seen the impact of the destruction of cultural objects and heritage on people’s ability to persist in a very contentious world, and people’s well-being, so that I am convinced that this may, in fact, be a very efficient way of addressing, ultimately, mortality and well-being, if we can explore those things.

I work a lot with Mayan communities in Guatemala. And their whole history has been one of cultural destruction. Yet they still hold on and value in ways that provide a social fabric that is essential to their well-being and willingness to continue to struggle against remarkable obstacles and oppression. So I welcome the comment, because it focuses, perhaps, attention on what we will need to do, and perhaps what I will need to do in my contribution here, to address these issues in a more focused way.